A “shipping plan” is Amazon’s proposed plan for splitting your inventory between fulfillment centers. It is automatically generated by Amazon when you use the “send/replenish” button on your Manage Inventory screen. A shipping plan may, for example, direct you to send two units of SKU 001 and four units of SKU 002 to Baltimore, while directing you to send ten units of SKU 001 to Moreno and eight units of SKU 002 to Tampa. You have the option of accepting the shipping plan or canceling it. To the best of my knowledge, there is no penalty for canceling a shipping plan.

If you accept the shipping plan, Amazon creates one or more “shipments,” for you, each to a particular warehouse. At this point, you’re committed to following through with each of the shipments indicated. Although shipments can be canceled, this should be done sparingly and only as a last resort, since Amazon does penalize sellers who repeatedly cancel shipments.

So is there a better way to create the shipments for the users such that there is less splits. We know spilts happen, we know they happen more so in Q4 but we’re trying to optimize the listing creation part. if the users creates their own shipment plans on Seller Central and doesn’t use us then it seems the splits are not as bad.

Thanks so much everyone. One thing we did learn through this is that we can allow the seller to add items to existing shipment plans if the warehouse designation and prep type/labeling instructions are the same and that is good to know as we’ll be building a solution for that.